Fighting terror after Afghanistan

As first-year President George W. Bush spoke through a bullhorn standing on rubble amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center, one of the workers crowded into the pit shouted: "We can’t hear you!"

This was on Sept. 14, 2001.

"I can hear YOU," Bush replied. "The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

Last Tuesday, after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, another first-year president, Joe Biden, spoke at the White House, warning terrorists responsible for suicide bombings that killed Americans and Afghans at the Kabul airport the previous week: "We will hunt you down and make you pay … We are not done with you yet."

Two defiant presidential declarations, two decades apart, used words you'd expect from the leaders of any nation whose people are attacked.

But the rhetorical echo across 20 years also reflects how radically different the facts, circumstances and politics have become in both Afghanistan and the U.S. Biden was brandishing drone strikes after withdrawal; Bush was about to launch years and years of troop escalation by evoking a "war on terror."

Now the question becomes: How, when, and where will the U.S. react to future terrorist acts against us?

Thousands of U.S. troops are reported to be active in Africa, against Boko Haram and other militant groups battering local populations. Jihadis also maintain an oppressive presence in Pakistan, Niger, Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen and the Philippines. People are forced to flee, with refugees from terrorism joining the growing number of climate-change refugees whose way of life is crushed by storms, fire and floods. How involved do we need to be there?

Bad actors of varying kinds can target American interests and, as we’ve seen since 9/11, cause carnage here and in Europe through internet-radicalized volunteers. Over the past 20 years, this became a driver of constant security measures and surveillance, as did the domestic threat from right-wing extremists. There's no choice but to keep the guard up at airports, train stations and other facilities, in ways that make sense.

Twenty years ago, the Taliban was shielding al-Qaida and one of its founders, Osama bin Laden, the criminal mastermind of the grotesque 9/11 massacres. The U.S. and allied forces routed the Taliban and backed ultimately shaky governments in Kabul. Bin Laden was killed a decade ago in Pakistan. After that, the stated goal was to ensure Afghans' social progress could last in our absence.

For the moment, the Taliban rides high again. But it is telling that even as various jihadis in other places celebrate, ISIS-K — the demon behind last month's Kabul airport attack — has been a mocking antagonist of the Taliban.

Can the theocratic "winners" in Kabul crush or win over their power rivals in that sprawling, mountainous, opium-driven country? Even past Taliban-friendly powers such as China and Russia are known to be concerned about fundamentalist radicalism that can ferment within Afghanistan's borders. Pakistan and India have a stake, too.

The shape of terror threats always changes.

By all accounts, we in the U.S. are saying farewell to nation-building experiments, boots-on-the-ground occupations, and hopefully, false intelligence reports like those that supported the Iraq misadventure. What then becomes America’s overriding doctrine in world affairs?

The most attractive goal is tricky to achieve. If it is our role to promote human rights and freedom, weapons of choice might have to be limited to economic, diplomatic and other variations of "soft power."

The blunder-struck evacuation last month offers an opportunity for Biden, Congress, the Pentagon and all of us to consider the goals of the republic in broad strokes and the quality of information on which the U.S. acts. A quick glance back tells us the Taliban takeover was going to be far swifter than the administration had wishfully predicted just a few months ago.

A reassessment of our giant defense budget to ensure it is actually tailored to 21st-century defense priorities, and not just spending as local stimulus, is long overdue. Slashing it has been a bipartisan no-no for years, with all the jobs and contracts at stake. More than 70 countries host American military bases of different kinds.

Even with a budget that spiked past $700 billion for fiscal 2022, the Pentagon has received minimal scrutiny of its spending, partly under the rationale that a security agency must keep certain details confidential. Whatever the merits of future spending plans, the billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan and Iraq over the years could have funded many infrastructure and other key domestic spending priorities now on the table.

Our nation has interests to re-evaluate and protect, away from Afghanistan. Isolation is impossible due to threats from internet propaganda, cybercrimes against our infrastructure, and the global nature of trade and commerce.

The world has changed since 9/11. Generals may tend to fight the last war; avoiding that requires a realistic new view of defense.